Delicacies of the Dining Car

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By Corby Kummer

Nov. 28, 2018

FOOD ON THE MOVE Dining on the Legendary Railway Journeys of the WorldEdited by Sharon Hudgins Illustrated. 256 pp. Reaktion Books. $35.

A friend once stayed at my Beacon Hill apartment because, he said, he had booked serial flights for the sole purpose of writing and they kept laying over in Boston. I understood, sort of. When I most need to concentrate, I find reasons to take serial trips on the Acela, the pleasantest work environment I know. The postcard parade of the Connecticut coast, the soothing water views — what could be more delightful, more conducive to creativity? My houseguest’s airplane isolation produced several best sellers that keep him flying to highly paid speaking gigs. And he was indifferent to the food! Imagine what those Amtrak views fueled by delightful meals could inspire.

I am of course far from the first to find trains uniquely pleasant or productive. “Food on the Move,” a new collection of essays by various writers, describes dining by rail — in an exalted past and, in the book’s tantalizing narratives, sometimes today — as an experience as exhilarating and varied as watching the scenery unfold mile by mile. Trains, after all, are not like planes or long-haul ships, which must stock their food on departure and face the challenges of onboard storage and cooking facilities — all but insurmountable on arid, space-challenged planes if relatively minor on cruise ships, which have become floating 18-hour buffets. Trains can replenish their stocks with the very freshest and most local produce every day. Enterprising galley chefs can explore the best local bakers and fishmongers and farmers and take their goods aboard at dawn stops.

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The visions laid out in this book of the glory days of the Orient Express, the grandest and most local cuisine-oriented of the trains surveyed here, or of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, on which bearers would telegraph orders to a railway kitchen down the line for hot delivery at the next stop, make my celebrations over the appearance of a new snack packet in the Amtrak cafe car seem particularly paltry.

Yet the norm was more often exemplified by the English writer who warned in 1884 that “the existence of the railway sandwich and its spread throughout the country has long been a source of terror to the people and of anxiety to the medical fraternity.” The way to eat well on a train, then and now, was to bring your own food — or buy it from vendors who would set up on platforms for trains passing through. This rose to the level of a folk art on the Trans-Siberian Railway, which the book’s editor, Sharon Hudgins, recalls from a 1994 trip: “The vendors quickly unpacked their wares and set up an instant outdoor buffet on the ground: hot pirozhki … sweet pastries and yeast buns, jars of fruit preserves … salmon caviar, fresh white curd cheese … Siberian pine nuts … smoked or salted fish — all wrapped in newspapers or served in paper cones made from pages torn out of books and magazines.” This impromptu Smorgasburg was of course more appealing than anything else on the train, where, at least in the days of the Soviet Union, the offerings were almost nonexistent because “the dining-car staff often ran a lucrative (and illegal) side business selling the train’s food supplies to locals at the stations where the train stopped.”

Preparing food for, rather than in, trains rose to an international art in Japan, where railway dining centered on ekiben, specialized bento boxes sold in station shops whose contents form a beautifully arranged full meal representative of the place where it is made and the season. These became both “objects of nostalgic consumption” and prized souvenirs for travelers to bring home, as the cultural anthropologist Merry White, the author of a book on the coffee culture of Japan, recounts. Even the way the paper wrapping the box is folded, to be carefully refolded after consumption, is exquisite.

But strict attempts at the local are otherwise rare, as scenic and historic though the train excursions featured here may be. Today, Rovos Rail and Luxrail, in South Africa, and the Great Southern Rail, through the Australian outback, attempt ambitious cuisine at sky-high prices, though earthbound. Americans who love trains above all other forms of travel will sigh loudest during a chapter on the glory days of the Santa Fe Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago, whose décor was inspired by the Native American tribes in the areas the trains traversed. Here the abundant photographs make it particularly difficult to ignore the fact that all the customers were white, or the cultural appropriation that both glorified and exoticized the locals. But it isn’t so hard to conjure a vision of more equitable journeys where the food keeps pace with the ever-changing scenery.

Corby Kummer, the editor in chief of Ideas: The Magazine of the Aspen Institute and a senior editor at The Atlantic, is the author of “The Joy of Coffee.”